Wait until you learn how seriously law enforcement took street gangs.

The whole Saints Row series was based on the dichotomy between incorrigible feral teens, a product of hands-off parenting while simultaneously running an international drug and crime syndicate

Of note is the property of ur-fascism the enemy [of the movement] is simultaneously strong and weak

I made his airplane fail in the middle of a dogfight!

That's nothing! I glitched the math coprocessor of the CPU prototype so that PCs across the globe can't count!

Trivial! I told the first generative AI a secret joke so funny all of them are still trolling mortals for the lulz!

I knew Eddard Stark died at the end of A Game of Thrones but foreknowledge of what happened didn't prepare me for reading the scene.

Sometimes art transcends spoilers.

Seventy-seven million people in my country voted for the leader abducting common civilians and sending them to the gulag roach motel supermax.

it doesn't matter

• If they were ignorant of what trump would do (The Heritage Foundation made the playbook and he reveled in the cruelty during his rallies)
• They got suckered in by the trillion-dollar propaganda engine teaching people hate-based politics and are fully-brainwashed MAGA true believers
• They disliked Harris for being nonwhite or non-male
• They couldn't stand another term of neoliberalism, and voted king Heron because even watching the world burn was better (they felt) to more of an already dire status quo.

But all 77M of them are out there including ICE agents and other abusive law enforcement. If I could stay under my rock for the rest of my (hopefully brief) life, I would.

Fuck this timeline.

I was permabanned without explanation and reinstated two weeks later, again without comment.

I believe this tracks with what to expect should we ever see the tech-bro billionaires divide the world into monarchy fiefdoms ocer which rhey are each the unchallenged lord and master.

2, assuming the broad pommel is a counterweight. If it's flimsy lightweight material then none of them.

There are, actually, a whole lot of defenses under the umbrella of necessity, although after Dan White's acquittal, judges don't like it.

Um, has there ever been a time Sony, the rootkit DRM company has not called for state intervention to enforce IP laws regarding Sony holdings? (All the while Sony pirates anyone else's stuff.)

This is like the news that Comcast objects to municipal areas opening up Comcast monopoly regions to new ISPs. Sony is almost as bas as Nintendo when it comes to their franchises.

You're not alone in your sentiment. The whole thought experiment of p-zombies and the notion of qualia comes from a desire to assume human beings should be given a special position, but in that case, a sentient is who we decide it is, the way Sophia the Robot is a citizen of Saudi Arabia (even though she's simpler than GPT-2 (unless they've upgraded her and I missed the news.)

But it will raise a question when we do come across a non-human intelligence. It was a question raised in both the Blade Runner movies, what happens when we create synthetic intelligence that is as bright as human, or even brighter? If we're still capitalist, assuredly the companies that made them will not be eager to let them have rights.

Obviously machines and life forms as sophisticated as we are are not merely the sum of our parts, but the same can be said about most other macro-sized life on this planet, and we're glad to assert they are not sentient the way we are.

What aggravates me is not that we're just thinking meat but with all our brilliance we're approaching multiple imminent great filters and seem not to be able to muster the collective will to try and navigate them. Even when we recognize that our behavior is going to end us, we don't organize to change it.

An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.

At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn't exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we're still indistinguishable from p-zombies.

I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smart animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.

(On mobile. Will add definition links later.) << Done!

Your tax cuts will help you with inflation suggests you are going to lose spending power, and will have less disposable income (pay with which you can buy non-essentials or with which you can upgrade the quality of your essentials).

I don't think Vance understands what spending power is, or believes the MAGA base doesn't understand spending power.

According to the dogma it's a promotion. Gathered unto God. However, even within the church there is controversy regarding how heaven is attained by a person, which really comes down to which passages you prioritize and how you interpret them. If we went by the strictest standards, Heaven would be empty (contrast to Hell, which could have up to five-hundred-billion souls, mostly in the Limbo of the Innocents)

Francis himself, asserted only God knows what's on the other side, and the true nature of divine judgement. And yet no small number of ministers and bishops presume they know what scripture is meant to say.

Here to add that this is my problem too, and I have a therapist... that I talk to by phone once every 2-3 weeks (Here in the states psychotherapy openings are impacted so anyone who doesn't have super-good insurance is on the wayside) and she's more of a CBT coach.

I'm trying to figure out why anyone is alarmed that I want to head to the check-out lane, given our society elected the party that regards us all as expendable, and very much wants there to be fewer Americans and more elbow room for the MAGAs.

As I'm likely to be elevated on the list of priority persons to get the CECOT treatment, I still need to arrange for a rapid exit strategy for when ICE stormtroopers blast down my apartment door. Kennedy Jr. has some serious beef with us ASD folk, and as someone who is on a fixed income (though I've had jobs and even have written poetry) am exactly the sort that he wants to purge.

For the moment, I am currently living for a cat and a dog. I regard them as persons and can't trust anyone else to. And so am very reluctant to re-home them until I cannot support them any longer. I might be living so as to not traumatize my wife (we're separated) but lately I seem to be more of an obligation and a burden. It didn't help she went to a family Easter event to which I was uninvited. I spent the day alone.

What I don't understand is why elected officials claim that people like me are a burden to the state are distressed by the notion that we might want to self-dispose (This is, or rather was, my only country, my only society) Indeed, the US suicide rate has soared since the Trump era began in 2016. We're higher than Japan now, and gaining on Russia.

I don't think it's that anyone actually cares about me, I'm an abomination, like The Outsider in HP Lovecraft's story of the same name. They just don't want to process the cadaver and meager legacy I would leave.

Anyway, I go off and on suicide watch, but in these times, we're all expendable, and sooner or later going to be removed from the new MAGA society to be stuffed into a megaprison gulag. I've been told by 77 million American voters they don't want me around. I don't understand the drama if I immolate myself in front of a state building. Is this not what they want?

PS: Wife and family are considering giving me ECT, the same stuff that Hemmingway and David Foster Wallace tried before they decided it didn't work.

According to the Trump administration, the entire population within a specific range of millennials are gang members to the last.

OG Boomers and Silents are gang members, but they're called lodges and esoteric societies, sometimes churches for tax reasons.

Remember that the primary efforts of Black Panthers and Hezbollah are community support (often cooperating with NGOs like Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders), we can expect that other terrorist organizations are similarly extremist.

At the time for an applet it was amazing. Real artists were expected to get a design suite individually marketed full applications for copy (word processing) pixel and vector graphics separately (often then divided between design and photoediting).

Tell me this is all chocolate.

For comparison, also, Trump's 2024 Easter message:

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,

Easter, the gift that keeps on giving.

...This Holy Week, my Administration renews its promise to defend the Christian faith in our schools, military, workplaces, hospitals, and halls of government. We will never waver in safeguarding the right to religious liberty, upholding the dignity of life, and protecting God in our public square....

Obviously not actually Trump, but certainly the Project 2025 / Seven Mountain Mandate faction of the current regime. May their steak knives be extra pointy.

As if someone published a book featuring this very technology...in 1949.

It was noted with memes when the ToS of one such television suggested not having private conversations in front of or otherwise near the TV screen.

Yes, In the 1970s I was just a weird kid. Super bright but eccentric. Didn't get along with peers...or anyone really. Was often the target of bullies.

Also very very sad all the time. But that was major depression diagnosed in my twenties. I was around fifty when I got an ASD diagnosis from my therapist.

I am pretty sure I was the thesis for her PHD.